My email In-box and the Search Engine Forums got pretty busy after my last article about paid submissions to directories. Seems to be a great deal of confusion on the subject, so let's look a bit further into the subject.

If you were off-planet and missed the article, the gist of it was that several places that charge for submissions should be on your "A-list" when you start promoting you site.

Aside from a few hold-overs from the 90's who still feel that everything on the Internet should be given to them for free (in other words: somebody else should pay for it) most of the reaction was basic confusion.

Let's take a look at LookSmart, which probably led the confusion category.

The reality is that LookSmart reaches a larger Internet audience than any other entity. Because they supply search results to such portals as CNN, MSN, Excite and AltaVista as well as through their own search site, LookSmart is able to expose your site to over 77% of the Internet population, or in round numbers, 58 million people. That's an impossible market penetration to ignore. On the surface this level of market penetration should be making your server logs fill up, right? Right. But you may not know it.

When your site is listed in LookSmart's directory it is suddenly available on the hundreds of search sites that use the LookSmart data. The listing comes from LookSmart, but the traffic comes from any one of these LookSmart "partner" sites. What you suddenly see in your logs is increased traffic from MSN.com, CNN or any one of their other partner sites. While your logs do not show a sudden, massive increase in traffic from LookSmart, they are directly the cause of your increased traffic.

The exact same situation exists with tracking results from your listing in the Open Directory Project (ODP) which supplies search listings to hundreds, if not thousands of other search portals. Some of the sites that use their listing database are huge, well-known portals. Many are either smaller vertical portals or simply search services offered by many sites wanting to offer enhanced services to keep their traffic flowing.

It is a fairly simple matter to purchase a copy of the Hyperseek directory management software and import the ODP database into it and suddenly be offering your users access to 2 million reviewed web sites. The sites listed in that Hyperseek directory will start appearing in the traffic logs of the sites listed and will be identified as coming from your site, not from ODP.

But how did you get that traffic? Because your site was listed in ODP's database.

ODP does not charge a listing fee as their listings are reviewed and maintained by a volunteer staff of thousands of editors. If you feel like giving a bit back to the Net, why not volunteer to edit a category at ODP? You'll learn and enjoy results of your efforts.

Other directories providing results to search services do not share the "identity" problems faced by ODP and LookSmart.

Overture supplies results to a growing list of search portals, however all traffic generated by those partnerships flow back through the GoTo.com servers causing the traffic to appear in your log files as hits directly from GoTo.com. This is necessitated by the fact that GoTo must account for all of the hits they generate in order to charge by the hit for being listed in their directory.

A similar situation exists for Direct Hit supplied listings at their search partner sites. Their motivation is to track the most popular sites in their list of categories. This means they must direct clicks through their own servers in order to properly track results.

About The Author

Serge Daudelin is a top Marketing Agent Regulary putting on marketing seminars and working for one of the largest Advertising Agency in Canada. http://www.wspromotion.com/